1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to cardiology, and more particularly to an ECG clock electrocardiogram based diagnostic device and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Holter monitors are portable electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) recorders used for long-term patient monitoring. They are incredibly valuable tools, as many cardiac events of interest to medical practitioners will not occur during brief recordings in a clinic. Instead, the patient must be monitored throughout their normal daily activities. After recording a patient for some time, usually 24 hours, data that has been collected by the Holter monitor is extracted and analyzed. A physician is then presented with a summary of events that occurred during the Holter recording such as min., max., and average values for a handful of important parameters like heart rate, for example. If a dangerous value is detected at some point in the recording, or the patient indicates that a symptom was experienced at a certain time of day, the physician might investigate further by manually checking the electrocardiogram tracing collected by the Holter monitor at the time of the event. This process is somewhat tedious, particularly if the physician has many patients to monitor. Additionally, the recording summaries that are presented to the physician may drastically over-simplify the results, preventing the physician from uncovering relevant and important information. Therefore, there is a clinical need for a system that presents 24-hour electrocardiogram data in a simple form that is easy to read and interpret without over-summarizing it. Such a system would be extremely useful for diagnosis and monitoring of heart disease and anomalies.
An example of a heart anomaly that would benefit from such a system is Long QT Syndrome. Long QT Syndrome causes ventricular arrhythmia (and often, death) in thousands of people in the US each year. The risks associated with this congenital disease can be mitigated somewhat through medication and lifestyle changes. Specific genotype and other factors make the risk for fatal events highly individualized, so long-term monitoring is crucial in prescribing the best possible treatment. The advent of portable medical sensors including electrocardiograms (ECGs) makes long-term remote monitoring much more convenient for both doctor and patient. The collection of large amounts of ECG data is also incredibly valuable to researchers, for identifying trends and developing decision support algorithms, for example. However, analyzing the vast amounts of data obtained from these sensors represents a serious challenge. In a typical day the human heart beats approximately 100,000 times, and a physician would like to observe the patient over a diverse set of activities that span very differing timeframes (for example, from sleep and exercise down to events that may last only a few minutes). What is therefore needed is a system and method for visualizing electrocardiogram data that may span 24 hours or more, providing the physician with a diagnostic tool that has heretofore not existed.